by Jarrett Hoffman

“There’s no way for me to describe what it’s going to be like the first time the students hear The Cleveland Orchestra play this music,” Victoria Bussert said during a recent phone call. She heads the Music Theater program at BW and directs Saturday’s performance.
“It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because even on Broadway, you don’t get orchestras of this size, or this world-renowned,” Bussert said. “I’m kind of tingly just waiting for when we all walk into Severance [for rehearsal] and the students sing with them for the first time.”



For Vinay Parameswaran, leading The Cleveland Orchestra at Blossom on Saturday, August 17 at 8:00 pm will be only one important event in what
August is when the end of summer comes into sight, a blues for which Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony might be the antidote. The composer himself called it “the jolliest work I have so far written” — and the first movement really is bottled joy.
The crowd was out in force at Blossom Music Center on Saturday evening, August 3, likely due to more moderate temperatures than in recent weeks, lower humidity, and a cloudless sky. The Cleveland Orchestra’s attractive program was added incentive, with Andrey Boreyko as guest conductor, and Swiss-Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi as soloist in Beethoven’s
Whether performing with the Omni Quartet or soloing with The Cleveland Orchestra, violinist Jung-Min Amy Lee takes the same approach. “The orchestra is just a bigger setting for chamber music,” the associate concertmaster said in an interview last weekend. “It’s the same ideas, transfigured.”
British baritone Simon Keenlyside made the most of his recent visit to Severance Hall, offering an impassioned odyssey through Schubert’s 

It’s Valentine’s Day all week this week, and aside from the obvious gifts — flowers, chocolates, and shiny bling — there are a number of ways to take to heart the new advice of gifting your love interest experiences rather than things.